The true extent of Christopher Hitchens’ literary achievement is apparent only when one reflects that two of his favourite authors were Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse. With those shining examples before him, he contrived for decades to produce some of the world’s most pompous and constipated prose. The caption to one photograph in this autobiography runs: “Blockading a racist hairdresser, 1968.” I won’t call that the funniest line in the book, because as far as I could discover it was the only funny line in the book. And the humour was not intentional. Racism is not, after all, a joking matter. One question occurred to me again and again as I toiled through Hitch-22 andthe dull story of Hitch’s short journey from Trotskyism to neo-conservatism: what is his mother tongue? Because it certainly isn’t English. Yes, if Waugh is a swallow and Wodehouse a hummingbird, then Hitchens has all the aerial grace and acrobatic skill of the Guggenheim Museum. If you’d like to feel your synapses shrivel, read on:

Let us go, then, you and I [sic], to a dingy and rather poorly lit union hall in Haringay, North London. The time: the mid-1970s. The place: a run-down but resilient district, with a high level of Irish and other immigrant population. I am the invited speaker and the subject is Cyprus, the former British colony in the Mediterranean which has recently been attacked and invaded by both Greek and Turkish armies. Many refugees from this cruel bombardment and occupation have arrived in London to join the staunchly working-class and left-wing Cypriot community that has been here since the 1930s. My articles on the ongoing imperial crime have won me a certain audience. The brothers and sisters in Haringay aren’t easily impressed by visiting talent, and it’s unlikely that I’ll even get the taciturn treasurer of the local branch to refund my “tube” fare from downtown, but I’m used to this no-nonsense style and have even trained myself to approve of it. Before being exposed to my scintillating rhetoric, the audience will be subject to a steady series of quotidian preliminaries… (“The Fenton Factor”, pg. 137 of the Atlantic Books paperback)

Hitchens is further proof of the connexion between left-wing politics and bad prose. We aren’t in need of further proof while Noam Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould remain in print, but I can recommend this book if you’d like to see Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie brought into disrepute. Hitch retails toe-curling stories about his two most famous literary chums. The Schadenfreude truly is terrific. If Hitch’s fellow theophobe Richard Dawkins wrote as badly as Hitch does, I’d abandon all my religious doubts and join the Society of Pius V. Alas for theists everywhere, Dawkins doesn’t, but the “Argument fromHitch” should still join the five classic proofs of God’s existence. Could anyone produce prose of this quality without divine assistance? Even the most militant atheist might feel a tremor of doubt.